Crime is the most basic of problems. But across the political spectrum we see different strategies.
On the right, the go-to solution has always been to ramp up policing, to make the basic function of the state — crime-fighting — stronger and more effective.
On the left, a leading idea has been to disarm the populace so people cannot do as much harm, and also to “rehabilitate” troubled folks with government TLC.
I grew up in the ’70s, when the failures of benevolent leftism (which we called “liberalism”) were becoming clear. So there was a reaction: Lock more people up.
That reaction fizzled in recent years, and, perhaps not wholly coincidentally, crime on a city-by-city case, as well as nationally, has increased.
Nevertheless, during this period another policy has gained a huge momentum: instead of disarming the populace, arm them!
How’s that going? The most recent case study is in Maine, which in 2015 allowed permit-less concealed carry of firearms.
“While rates of violent crime increased nationally from 2015 to 2020,” writes Steve Robinson in “Maine Crime Fell Following 2015 Repeal of Gun Control Law” (MaineWire, December 29, 2022), “the rate of violent crime in Maine fell steadily beginning in 2015, after a slight increase from 2014 to 2015, according to data collected by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program.”
Robinson notes that while the Maine experience doesn’t prove that “an armed society is a polite society,” it falsifies, quite clearly, the catastrophic predictions made by gun control advocates back in 2015.
I hazard it does much more. It shows that distributed power (in this case, firepower and defensive capacity) in the peaceful population is a separate, non-left/non-right solution to the age-old problem of crime.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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